I’m sitting here writing a job description, and so I’m once again thinking meta about staff.

What is the purpose of staff? What is their function?

At some point we were all staff. A staff of one in some cases – we were general dogsbody, head buyer, morale officer, do you want fries with that server. Open when we were awake, closed when we were asleep staff. And at some point we became I’m not even supposed to be here today staff. For thirty years we all have a template as to what staff are and how they should behave, thanks to Kevin Smith. Smith’s characters don’t give a shit. They have their own inner lives to worry about.

Clerks came out in 1994. A year before Richard Linklater had released Dazed and Confused. Together they gave voice to a generation, and gave that generation a name.

Slacker.

Trapped between education and employment, the slacker chooses neither. In the face of imminent nuclear war, the erosion of perceived benefits of their Boomer parents – jobs for life, decent salaries, home ownership, picket fences – came an erosion of their value system. Hard work was not its own reward. The denizens of Clerks are trapped between their own idea of who they should be and the reality of who they are. What, you think Gen Z invented entitlement? Or millennials. no – that was us, Gen X, riffing of James Dean. What were the characters of Clerks rebelling against? Everything and nothing. “Whatdaygot? I’m not even supposed to be here today”.

I cried when I read an article about slackers, because I finally felt seen. Because this was me – bouncing between dropping out and fitting in. I hung around university doing odd jobs where I wasn’t even supposed to be here today. EWvery night Mary would tell me I probably wouldn’t be needed the next day and then every morning I’d get that phone call. Needing me.

I was a zero hour contract kid before it was cool.

And it was never cool.

Here’s the thing though. The Nineties was the first big age of retail disruption. Only disruption back then meant malls over high streets. They had slowly popped up like monstrous carbuncles across the retail landscape – all stores under one roof. And this made existing stores on high streets less tenable. But your landlord doesn’t care if you are less tenable or not – he still wants his commercial rent. And so your job is less tenable too – more precarious. The life your parents enjoyed is now beyond you, because the one thing they had that you are denied is cradle to grave job security.

As each generation ages, they are replaced. Replacement theory is real, it’s just generational and age based. The new generation pays in to pensions so the older generation cashes out, first financially and then terminally. Your cradle to grave security is just that. But we weren’t even supposed to be there today. Gen X was convinced that we would die of thermonuclear war or drugs or Aids – just say no kids, to everything.

So we did.

That’s what your staff are there to do. Replace you. Be the not-you when the you is absent. You want them to think like you, act like you, make decisions like you. You don’t just need them to be there today, you need them to be THERE today. To sublimate their interests into your own. To align. To be your gallowglass. Your security.

The first task – and arguably the most important task – is to maintain the security of your business. Yes yes, serving customers is important. But the act of taking money for goods and or services IS a security task. Security and integrity, for the two are interchangable. The physical security of your business – unlocking and locking your doors, opening and closing your till, loss prevention from theft, protection of your interests and occasionally protection of your customers are all security tasks. While your staff member is in, that’s all on them. Maintaining the physical security of your business. You can also expect them to maintain the online security of your business, and not to happily send ten thousand pounds worth of Pokemon boosters to that random online guy who Shopify flags up as fraudulent. Not to download hentai onto your hard drive. Not to expose you to additional threats above and beyond the normal day to day threats, so not to bring your business into disrepute. What disrepute means varies from business to business. But you don’t want to employ people with views that are antithetical to your own.

Ethos is security.

It bulwarks you with integrity armor.

Integrity is security.

A former employer used to buy stolen goods. He knew they were shoplifted – hard not to when they come pre-priced with another store’s stickers. Shoplifting is like urban big game hunting – you can kid yourself that the crime has already been committed, that the animal is already dead, but somewhere retail Bambi is crying for their game mother. In the urban jungle, stores are either prey or fences. Stolen goods are cheap, but the cost for dealing in them is that your customer base is also now a rogues gallery of thieves that would make Forge Fitzwilliam blush. Thieves need security too of course – they need to know you aren’t going to double cross them – by, say, not buying that burglarised NFL top. Because once you are a fence, they want to fence everything, and pretty soon you’ll be buying gold fillings from corpses. And the day you say no? Well, you just became prey, and you are like criminal Cheers – every shoplifter in town knows your name and knows that you are the reason they had to trudge back home with a bag of stolen NFL t-shirts and a car radio.

They weren’t even supposed to steal that today!

You want your staff to be on shoplifters like a bear on honey. Without the licking, although that would definitely be a deterrent. Shoplifter and staff member are locked forever in eternal battle like Wil-e Coyote and Road Runner. Meep Meep Motherfucker. But unlike Saturday morning cartoons, this isn’t a conflict your staff signed up for. They are unwilling combatants, their mental health collateral damage. The shoplifter only needs a momentary distraction to win. You never forget the first time a shoplifter lifts from your shop. It’s a gut punch. Like you failed a test nobody told you you’d be taking, and the guy who was taking it happily took it and ran off laughing and pointing like Nelson Muntz. £2, £20, £20,000. It’s the thought that counts. Your legs spinning around in mid air before your body falls a thousand feet to the bottom of the canyon. A.C.M.E. won’t save you now.

Sometimes it’s hard to be a boss because being a boss often means watching your staff fail. But that coyote picks himself up and gets back in the game. His boss isn’t going to fire him. He has a security of his own – job security. One thing every boss in the history of the world has done is fucked up. Give those humans free will? Even God gets in on the act. Gonna be some repercussions for that, says the one character who can talk to God mano e mano. What does God do? He fires his sorry Mornigstar ass.

He wasn’t even supposed to be here that day. And that was like, day seven of creation.

Pretty soon God is dealing with the ramifications of his poor staff training decisions. Pillars of salt are involved. There is much smiting. Not much security if you live in those proto inner sea kingdoms – God gets so mad he floods the whole shebang and drowns literally everyone – even the dogs and the cats. Save two of each and after that its smite city, population: everyone. Except Noah and his family. He was like, God’s shift supervisor. Everyone else was fired. Slash and burn baby.

This is often the first response a boss has to a security crisis.

Last month was the anniversary of the Manchester bombing. On the 22nd of May every year Victoria Station is filled with floral tributes. I was running events that night, in the old store, when we heard an almighty crash. You don’t think ‘bomb’. We don’t live in a world where your mind goes automatically to ‘bomb’. This isn’t the Nineties. The venue had security of course. After the fact everyone is culpable though, right? They should have done this or that differently. Hundreds of chances to identify a lone bomber with a deathwish and feeling that everything wrong with society was Ariana Grande fans.

Twenty three people died.

There are worse things than that kid stealing a booster. There are points where losing eyes on the target means death. Your staff are just on a security continuum, and when things go bad – which they will – your job is to tell them that it’s not their fault. Yes, even when it is. We can’t rewind time, but we can learn. Each security breach is a learning experience – you learn where the snatch thief that Connor chased into the road sold the copy of Onslaught he stole.

You learn where the road runners swap the goods they steal with their handlers, because these days those shoplifters are pack hunters. Distraction. Point man. Snatcher. And when you cross them you are crossing their gang masters. Not steal enough? Your gang master won’t pay you. Only its drugs rather than money. Cross the gang masters and you’ll be targeted day in day out, snatch squad after snatch squad. Security for a shoplifter is access to drugs and not being beaten by your boss, in a world where being fired involves gasoline and matches on a patch of waste ground.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t try. You should practice vigilance, though not to the fault of suspecting intent to people who don’t look like they belong. Everyone looks like they don’t belong in the wrong place. Shoplifters by and large wear shoplifter gear – nice baggy trousers you can hide a frozen turkey down without freezing your giblets. Trainers for running fast and furious. Jackets, even in the warmest weather. It’s the worlds shittest disguise because it screams ‘I am baggy enough to hide product under’. You’re no Bill Murray in Quickchange, that’s for sure. Once you are generally aware of shoplifters, you start seeing them everywhere. You are the retail security version of Rowdy Roddy Piper in They Live, rather than Rowdy Roddy Piper in Hell Comes to Frogtown. Once you have worked security you can’t unlearn it. You see people eyeing up where the security cameras are, where the blind spots are, how observant the staff are. From now until the end of time, 10% of your processing power is threat identification.

That’s not something you can teach, except by failing.

Observation is a skill, like cold reading. Boss you probably got pretty good at identifying when a customer was a customer, when they were a time waster or an attention sponge, or a whale looking to spend the average GDP of a gulf state on Magic singles. And you needed to simultaneously weigh that up with not looking like you were weighing things up, those things being people. People do not like being weighed up. Your customers don’t like it, your staff don’t like it, even your shoplifters don’t like it. People like the security of knowing they are viewed as a human being first.

This is doubly so of people who don’t look like you.

We can all go into a space where we are seen as a threat. If I go into a classy store in my t-shirt and shorts and start looking at fixtures, a trained sales assistant will start to shadow me. A well trained sales assistant won’t. An exemplary sales assistant will be able to penetrate my ablative sales assistant armor with a question that engages with me and makes a connection. This is the best security measure, because an engaged customer is like a sales assistant you don’t have to pay. Because the greatest security comes from being in a great community. A great community isn’t gated, it doesn’t have security guards because nobody is kept out. The folks on the doors are not there to gatekeep, but to direct people to where they best get served and satisfied. And then you, boss-in-absentia, can sit back and sip your mojito.

Your work here is done. And you don’t have to be here today.

Most of us aren’t quite at that point. Last month a business one minute away was hit by a snatch squad who lifted £20K in Pokemon cards. In an A.C.M.E. crate marked Valuable Pokemon: Do Not Steal. If we were jewellers, that would be locked in a safe. That’s fine – in 2015 Lust Liquor and Burn had a one ton safe lifted out through their breeze block wall. Our own safe was stolen about the same time, with all our Magic cards in it. It was kind of a locked room mystery, only our locked room came with a door into the electricity room which the workmen remodelling the building had keys to.

Shoplifters are ten a penny in a city like Manchester, but safelifting is a Guy Ritchie movie. It’s the Stath, lantern jawed, putting ‘the team’ back together, all wise cracks and testosterone. Security are the incompetent dolts we laugh at when they give chase.

Yet that is us.

Twenty thousand pounds is a hard fuck up to write off. On CCTV you can watch the exact moment – on endless repeat – where your security was less effective than a chocolate fireguard. We know all the folks involved – yes, including baby faced shoplifter and weasel guy – they are, as they say ‘known offenders’. Everyone involved feels like shit – probably even the shoplifters do, because that value means it automatically gets upgraded from a slap on the wrist to a custodial sentence, and like I said… ‘known offenders’. And I get the primary impulse to fire all the staff involved. In the US where there are – shall we say – lax employment laws and rights, people can be fired for less. On a whim you might say.

But here’s a question:

Do you think your staff can be effective at securing your premises, your stock, your integrity, your customers when they are concerned about their own job security? When they have to pay rent? When they are one paycheck away from homelessless? How can people be expected to prioritise your needs when they are worried about their own? This was the true legacy of the bonfire of the retail sanities in those halcyon post mall decade. We stripped folks of their security and their dignity, stuck them on minimum wage with a name badge and expected them to do an exemplary job.

Which they did not always do. Would we, in the same situation?

Clerks was thirty years ago. But the tropes and themes are still relevant today, still reflected in every minimum wage employee in a zero hour contract job. We learned nothing from Dante and Jay and Silent Bob. But worse, our slacker selves became business owners and bosses and parents. And yet we still expect our replacements to somehow be where they are supposed to be, on the day they are supposed to be. To be mindful. To be observant. To be present in every sense of the word. And in order to do that, they need the security of knowing that their jobs – their lives – are not at risk if they fuck up, which they will. Because we did.

And they are our replacements.

p.s. And you know what? I WAS supposed to be in today. And I was in today. But I wrote this instead of doing any real work!

This is a column about porridge.

Rarely is the porridge just right. Games retail is often a Goldilocks game – too often our porridge is too warm or too cold, our mattress too lumpy, our young home intruder selves lost in the forest about to be eaten by hungry bears whose food we have stolen.

It would be great, wouldn’t it – to sleep soundly on a full belly of stock for once. Not too much or too little.

Just right.

But I don’t live in a fairytale world buddy. I work for a living, like the seven dwarves. Hi ho, hi ho – it’s off to the game mines we go. Sleepy, Dopey, Grumpy and some other dwarves I don’t really give a shit about because this isn’t a column about dwarves or porridge.

Turns out it was all a metaphor.

For Lorcana.

“What do you mean, I get to buy a game that isn’t complete? Who would buy a game where you only get sixty cards out of hundreds, and then you have to buy more packs to get more cards? That seems like a really bad idea” said an earlier version of me, passing on Magic. “What do you mean, you’ve bought fifty boxes of a new TCG sight unseen? Just because people have told you it’s going to be big? We are going to be sitting on those stupid boxes forever, like our Middle Earth the Wizards overstock!” said an earlier version of me, passing on Pokemon. Forever was shorter then.

We sold out in two days.

If you weren’t part of Magic fever thirty years ago or Pokemon 25 years ago, buckle up buttercup. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. Bumpy is the eighth dwarf – he runs the manic minecart ride at Hi Ho Mountain. And trust me, you want to be in the car rather than strapped to the tracks.

Now, unless you have an excellent Ravensburger trading history and a dossier of distro blackmail photos, the chances are you are not going to be filling your hamster cheeks with all the Lorcana porridge you can eat. No, this is going to be more like the start of Oliver Twist rather than the end of Christmas Carol.

But you can still come out of this looking like Scrooge McDuck – assuming you play your cards right.

Or at least sell them. Ravensburger and Disney both need this to work. They have a strong team, a great IP, a fantastic product range and they are pitching for a portion of the Disney merchandising spend. This is exciting for a number of reasons.

Last year was Magic the Gathering’s greatest ever year. Over $1 billion in revenue. This means it is catching up with Pokemon. But Disney merchandising alone – not the movies or the streaming or the theme parks or the videogames – is $60 billion. That’s a lot of mouseketeer money and no matter how big a portion comes our way, it’s a bigger portion than we currently have.

Because the House of Mouse fans are not natural gamers. They aren’t competitive in the way we understand competition and they have no financial filter as – again – we understand it. The heart wants what the heart wants. I learned that from Encanto.

Also see: generational trauma

It’s going to be easy to sell Lorcana. It’s always easy to sell something you don’t have enough of. As people started putting the line up for preorder, stores were hit by huge phishing attacks buying out all their stock. One store had three hundred box orders at the end of their first listing weekend. Nobody yet knows allocation, though rumor has it that it is going to be brutal. You will not have enough.

What you do have is an exclusive hobby retail presales window of two weeks before mass gets it. That’s two weeks for a frenzy to hit every store in the world like nothing on earth. You will buy out your competitors simply to get their allocation. When it hits mass, retailers will be waiting to buy every piece on every shelf in every store.

In

The

World.

A lot of us have talked privately about how this will create a false positive. Nobody will know what demand is really like, because nobody will have enough to bottom out. Magic the Gathering does not have a chain of theme parks. When Pokemon opened a Pokemon centre for a limited time in London’s Westfield Centre, there were eight hour queues. Daily. For a month.

Pokemon – globally – is around three percent of the annual Disney merchandising spend.

So what do we do? What is our function here – beyond selling packs?

Well, this is where Organised Play comes in. I know many of you have wondered – post Covid – what the point of Organised Play is. Well, originally Organised Play was about sales and marketing. Companies would throw you some promo cards or promo figures to run events to support their game, because engaged players BOUGHT MORE. Remember the days when they used to buy that ‘more’ from you? Yes, me too.

The problem with Organised Play is that it became a suckers game. Done wrong, you became a clubhouse where nobody bought anything – and publishers were surprisingly good with that. The problem is, we were bears who were running a rent free staycation for Magic Goldilockses, fluffing their mattresses, making them porridge just the way they liked it – free and copious. And there was always another bear family in Fabletown eager to please. Whole generations rose and died believing that Goldiebums on bearseats was some kind of instant profit generator. Porridge for everyone and Premium porridge for the nicest cottages. And any bear that growled was the Wrong Sort of Bear.

Organised Play stores are third spaces. It’s hard to effectively monetize most third spaces, and yet we succeeded – as an industry. This idea that space should be free and infinite is a distortion of the reality of the fact that space costs money. Time does too.

Of course Disney are no strangers to distorting reality, as anyone who has ever read the original Hugo version with Hunchback after singing along to the Disney version will testify. Spoiler: Esmerelda dies and Quasimodo is entombed alive with her corpse.

Ah, but wait. Let’s turn that frown upside down with a sprinkling of stardust and Disney magic. Because you’ve never had a store like me.

I often wondered what the Disney store would have been like if they had embraced Experiential Retail. Disney fans buy a lot of Disney stuff. They live it, eat it, sleep it and breathe it. But lets for a minute talk about pin trading.

Pin trading happens at the Disney parks. You can buy pins from the cast, from a seemingly ever changing selection of pins. And then you trade. If this was Magic people would say ‘how much for that Goofy pin’ and money would change hands. But this is Disney. Money is no good here.

People

Trade

They trade pins they don’t have for pins they do. It would be kind of weird the other way around, but bear with me. At the dawn of Pokemon kids traded like that too – because getting pins you hadn’t owned was a goal in and of itself. People travel to the parks for pin trading events, simply to score new pins they haven’t owned by trading pins they do.

This could be your store. Only now they can buy packs and Villainous. If you stock Loungefly bags and Disney tat, Funko Disney Illustrator – great game BTW highly recommended – imagine a world of Disney games  and a community of like-minded individuals ready to play with you.

Be our guest! No really, be OUR guest.

Imagine a Disney Princess D&D party, ready to go. Mulan the fighter, Meridia the ranger, Pocahontas the Druid, Esmerelda the Bard, Belle the Artificer, Rapunzel the Monk, Elsa the Sorceress, Tiana the Warlock. Or potentially they are all Wizards because they all have familiars… But this is an opportunity to rebrand everything we do, to a whole new community of people who spend money on their passion – frequently beyond reason!

That’s what we are playing for. That’s what Lorcana is offering us. Because yes, being mad keen on a thing can be a barrier to embracing other things. But a well run Organised Play store? The thing you become mad keen on is belonging, attending events, trading, being part of a community that services your needs to buy products and your desire to share that with others.

So there are Fifty Nine Billion Reasons why I’m going in heavy in Lorcana. Not just for the cards or the money. Because these are people you don’t see. People you haven’t engaged. People who were betrayed when Disney shut their stores post Covid. Cast adrift, alone and lost in the wilderness, desperately craving some third space that would welcome them with open arms and a trade folder of shiny Disney cards.

And from August 18^th, that is me.

On August 17^th at one minute to midnight we are bringing out the product for a midnight launch and case opening. How many products could handle a midnight launch? How many triple A videogames can handle that these days?

You can. Now.

With this.

In the days running up to and after, you will field increasingly desperate calls for any amount of product. Collectors will want to squirrel away multiple cases of product to flip. Don’t let them. This game needs to be in Disney FAN hands, sold by pack not case. Do what we do and limit sales to one pack or four packs per customer per day. Eke it out. Maximise your long term revenue those first two weeks.

Run demos

Sell starters.

Ravensburger plan Organised Play from the get go, but nothing competitive as yet. That suits the market for this game just fine. Disney as a brand skews female. You can play Lorcana multiplayer like Commander. Imagine a night where people were hanging out, playing Lorcana, buying a pack or two, grabbing snacks and sodas, trading cards with each other, maybe trading pins. Think of how Disney could have filled every Disney store with pre-engaged superfans, and marvel at the short sightedness of thinking the Covid online shopping boom had redrawn retail for ever.

You have the one thing money cannot buy.

Friends.

Lean into Cosplay. I just hired a second Cosplayer on staff – she probably doesn’t realize yet why. This is why. If you have craft supplies and craft activities, now is the time. Magic would kill for Magic players turning up in character, but that’s the difference between fans of a billion dollar brand and fifty nine billion dollars of Mouse fanatics.

Disney delivers.      

When mass gets this, buy it out. You need it more than they do. Yes, this will deliver a false mass positive and lead to a mass reliant overprint further down the line. For Magic that was Homelands. Every spike, every fad, every second coming has a period where it tries to find its legs. You would say that it has a stellar first year which tails off in the second – if it wasn’t for Bandai continually proving that wrong. With Ravensburger’s strategy you’ll know the glut two weeks before mass does. Before Dragonball, Digimon and One Piece every new TCG went out of the gate like a rocket and then sputtered and died by the end of year two. That’s not the world any more.

Fifty. Nine. Billion. Dollars. Worth of fans.

And criminals.

If there is one other thing I have learned these past few years it’s that dramatic TCG media exposure and burglaries and armed robberies of game stores go hand in hand. Lorcana is already attracting attention. At the moment it’s the good kind – though trying to buy out entire shop supplies indicates a certain desperation among a certain type of retailer.

This is a trading card game. There is no way of keeping your distributor honest except talking about allocations. With each other. Distributors have been known to… hedge their bets on hot product and suddenly find a container of it when the price has doubled. This will happen. And you’ll pay it, simply to be the store who has it. And then somebody else will buy it simply to be the fan who has it.

During the Pokemon boom – and you’ll remember the total worth of Pokemon is around three percent of Disney merchandising annual spend – out of print boxes of Evolution went for ten times list price. At a certain point, it becomes attractive to break and enter and burgle a store who has stock. You are Aladdin’s cave, and it doesn’t take a Djinnious or a magic carpet to spirit your treasure away. Just a van and a brick.

Criminals will case your joint to know when your delivery arrives. Boxes will go missing from couriers. At one point in the UK a lorry carrying Pokemon was hijacked. Merchandisers delivering to mass are robbed and beaten, stock stolen at gunpoint. Stock will be shoplifted. If we were jewelers with $1000 wedding rings, we’d lock them up in a safe every night. But you can’t do that with a pallet of trading cards.

Invest in security cameras. Make sure you have Redcare or the equivalent. Watch out for smash and grab window displays. Train your staff again on shoplifter detection and – more importantly – to tell when your shop is being cased. Does that guy with the baseball cap spend an inordinate length of time checking out your security camera locations? The more you engage customers verbally – you can ask them about Lorcana, kill two birds with one stone just in case – the more an advance man is going to feel uncomfortable.

Store overstock in your house.

Store a case in your loft.

Plan now.

Plan which night Lorcana is going to be on. What Disney activities you can theme alongside it just in case you have no stock. Set aside enough decks when they come in that you can run eight person play sessions just with those if you have to.

Plan your singles folder strategy.

Having an open booster that customers can swap with is a proven tactic that just might be more proven with a Disneycentric fanbase who will want to swap duplicates for stuff they don’t have. Farm out the expensive stuff into singles. Then secure that folder. Imagine it is full of moxes, because in ten years it just might be. A set of D23 promos currently sells for $10,000.

And that buys a lot of porridge.     

This? This is the real deal.

Thirty years ago, stores were not smart. It was an untested product that built its own category and in many ways crashed and burned by set six. Look where it is now.

Twenty five years ago, Organised Play barely existed. Stores sprang up only buying and selling Pokemon cards and everyone involved made out like bandits.

These things? Lightning rarely strikes twice, let alone three times. Here it is, the stormclouds gathering. Can you hear the Sorcerer’s Apprentice slowly building to a crescendo? Four months out. Fifty Nine Billion Dollars. Our industry – our stores – have never been better prepared. You have trained all your life for this one moment.

This is it.

I know, I know. You didn’t get enough. You could have sold more. It was too thin. It was too lumpy. But you my friend are in the porridge business now. We might not like it, but we sure as hell are going to serve it.

Happy ever after baby.

Recently I watched Pistol by Danny Boyle, and it reminded me about life in the Seventies. Britain was pretty run down, like we’d woken up from the Swinging Sixties with one hell of a hangover.

Pistol charts the history of the Sex Pistols. But to me the absolute stand out performance is by Thomas Brodie Sangster as impresario on the make Malcolm Maclaren. Together with Vivienne Westwood, Maclaren ran Sex – later Sedition, earlier Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, Let it Rock and Paradise Garage. But whatever it was called, Sex was the throbbing beating gristle at the heart of the UK Punk movement.

Every movement needs some throbbing gristle.

The fact is, for every pair of bondage trousers out the front, there was a stack of Pistols merch in the back. While preaching riot and sedition, everyone was getting on with the business of making money.

Sex was the first anti-shop.

Look, we all know what a shop looks like. What it feels like. Around the corner from Sex was a branch of Burtons menswear, everyone dressed in suits selling off the peg in a clean, tidy space. Burtons was what conformity looked like. And it was everything that the people at Sex were rebelling against.

From the moment James Dean replied with “what have you got?” every youth movement has been about rebelling. Even our own. We didn’t burn our books when Jack Chick came for us – we embraced being edgy.

My own anti-shop was Forever People on Park Street, Bristol, where games jostled for space alongside drug paraphernalia, long boxes of silver age comics and occult books. That was the reality for many of us. The weirdness was, Chick wasn’t precisely… wrong. Many of us drawn to the world of Dungeons and Dragons were also drawn away from mainstream religion into our own subculture, and we became proselytisers for our own new lifestyle.

By the end of ’83 half the school was playing Dungeons and Dragons.

Forever People did pretty well – well enough that owner Colin could retire with his collection of modern art worth a small fortune. There’s a certain knack to being a futurist, a zeitgeist surfer on the currents of the now.

Or… you could be Burtons menswear. The smart look for a junior clerk who seeks to conform.

I am an antishop.   

I am an anarchist

Don’t know what I want

But I know how to get it

Why be an anti-shop? Why not be that Burtons menswear branch you always aspired to be? Why can’t games be clean and respectable and professional?

Seriously? When did any youth movement aspire to that?

My kids are at school. I mean like, right now – because I’m writing this in the middle of the day. Their friends don’t want to tune in and conform – their life is a mood board of gender identities, sexualities and hair colours. Thousands of different musical subcultures.

And they want their Forever People too.

They want their Sex, their Sedition. They want places that they can inhabit as the current cost of living crisis warps time and space and takes us back to the Seventies.

And that space is us.

That D&D group is a found family. Your found family is made up of folks from all walks of life, who are thrown together and can only prosper by working together.

By supporting each other.

And that sounds like most of the LGBTQ+ kidss I know right now, right?

The more corporate we are? The more ‘professional’ along a limited axis of ‘professional’? The more of a turnoff we risk becoming. Nobody mourns when a chainstore goes out of business. You don’t remember your first visit to a Burtons Menswear, but I bet everyone who ever visited Sex remembered the experience and longed to be a part of it.

Heroes, just for one day.

So, how do we embrace the creed of the anti-shop? How do we embrace the chaos without letting it consume us?

The anti-shop is retail as theatre. Your shop is your stage. You are ‘on’ from the moment your doors are open. When you are not selling goods you are selling yourself, selling your staff, selling the overall ‘experience’ of your store. Professional, clean – these are things too – but the biggest thing you are selling is fun, happiness, engagement.

You forgot this during the pandemic.  

Organised play stores were never about places for people to play. They were places where you could sell, and what you were selling was community and lifestyle, for a minimal buy in price. You might not be able to afford a Vivienne Westwood, but you could buy a Sex Pistols t-shirt. And it would shock middle aged folk on the bus just as effectively.

You curate your space.  

Bring the customers you want to see front and centre. Bring the staff you want to see front and centre. Nobody in the history of advertising has responded well to corporate. All advertising and promotion in history is based on a desperate desire to not look like Burtons Menswear. Functional, corporate, clean – these are the words nobody wants to read on a tombstone.

And make no mistake. A cost of living crisis leaves tombstones in its wake.

This is where chainstores crumble and retail empires turn to dust. Look at all the mall ghosts, the burned out Blockbusters. Corporate professionalism did not save them. That quirky one or two person store can pivot quicker than the multi-branch monolith. The customer base we have sought – urban, professional, minted – is the market a crisis is disposable income most hits.

Be a store where it is not a financial choice where somebody shops. You are a lifestyle store now. Embrace your chaos. Do things that feel right or on brand. But on brand for you.

The anti-shop calls no brand master. Even itself.

Here are some of the organised chaos we have embraced at Fan Boy Three in the past:

Wear a hat win a mat. One sneak peek for Yugioh I awarded a prize to a player because he wore a nice hat. The next event a dozen people came wearing hats. We ran this as a promotion for a year, each time was different – once we had all the players vote for the hat, another time they had to be hand made – one guy built a crown using only discarded Yugioh commons stapled together and after that we dropped the promotion, since that was pretty unbeatable.

We gave away prereleases. I still do – whether it’s for winning events, league attendance, doing something special for the community or simply not being able to afford to play. You think people fight to protect a store that maximises every potential take? To be an anti-store you have to learn when to let that punk band borrow your best bondage trousers.

Safe spaces and corporate spaces rarely mix. Every school is serious about ending bullying and yet every school is full of bullies.

“Can I help you with anything?” is a challenge. To a customer who may feel they do not belong it reinforces the idea that they do not in fact belong. That’s what they would have said to nerdy Dave in his school uniform had I stumbled into Sex. Half the time what you are saying is ‘get out, you don’t belong’. I’m pretty certain that’s not the message you intend to give.

“Can I help you with anything?” is what a fancy French restaurant says to me in my shorts and t-shirt. They aren’t asking me to sample the escargot.

We all have our own way of greeting folks non-confrontationally. I have like a dozen I got through, but most often it’s a variation on implied belonging. Like: “If you are here for the Magic prerelease it starts at seven”

Now THEY know there’s a Magic prerelease that starts at seven. They think that I think that they belong enough that I am imparting information rather than challenging them on whether they belong or not. In a best case scenario they say “what is Magic?” You think they would ask that WITHOUT what we call an ‘in’?

No, people don’t routinely do that.

You build in conversational ‘in’s into your customer responses. Ask someone who their favourite Pokemon is, and they’ll give you a response, but ask if you can help them with anything? Nine times out of ten they will brush you off.

Just because our primary goal as an anti-store is to sell experience and belonging doesn’t mean we don’t also sell a lot of stuff. Malcolm Maclaren sold more t-shirts than Vivienne Westwood sold bondage trousers. You can afford to sacrifice profit for publicity, but only if that publicity helps build YOUR brand.

Here’s the thing.

Often as stores we sacrifice our own brand identity in the pursuit of a common goal. And I’m not sure it’s always worth the trade off. Every GW store is now a sad little one person operation that lacks the vibrancy of a store like ours which is cross brand.

Pokemon has the strongest brand identity of all the hobby lines.

Magic has the strongest brand identity for each individual set. You can theme your store, do fancy dress, make on brand drinks menus. But I’m honesty not convinced that most of the players care that much. I’ve dressed my store, dressed my staff, spent money making my own event merch… but at the end of the day nothing I did significantly shifted the needle.

For Magic… but that doesn’t mean dressing up doesn’t shift the needle for me, peroanlly.

What even does the Magic lifestyle look like anymore? Well, it looks like Tuesdays at Ply, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays in store. It looks like a whole room of players playing Commander or Pioneer. It looks like a community, and that community sells Magic more than any store ever could. More than a decent display, or a theme, or fancy dress.

Because the games industry perfected the anti-store. And we did it years ago. Because the people who bought into our lifestyle got to inhabit our space and make it their own.

The Organised Play store was the pinnacle of retail evolution (which is why Apple copied it!)

What we failed to do was understand what we had, and to capitalise on it. Space costs money and people who want to inhabit that space need to pay, either through purchases or engagement. Sure, Maclaren and Westwood had hangers on, but they put them to work either in the shop or in the band.  

Manchester’s Northern Quarter is quirky and full of cafes and restaurants with mismatched tables and chairs. This is a look that screams anti-shop – or anti-cafe. You could eat at Starbucks or you could eat at Nibble.  One is a corporate entity and another a women’s collective. One serves conformity, the other non-conformity. Or a different type of conformity if you want to get pedantic! Manchester is a big university city, and each year more young people away from home for the first time in their lives discover me. In the next three years they will forge their own identity.

And stores like myself and Nibble? We want to be part of that. And in turn those people want to be part of us.

There is another path that’s not the path to Premium. There always was. My engagement numbers prove it. My new player acquisition numbers prove it. You can reject corporatisation and still be effective at business. You can be Malcolm Maclaren too. And during the onrushing cost of living crisis, your livelihood might just depend on it.

Lean in to the chaos.

For this is the age of the anti-shop

Not everyone has to own everything. It is in fact a statistical improbability at the best of times, let alone during a cost of living crisis.

In Maslows hierarchy of needs, a blinged up version of Tsuro? Pretty far up the pyramid. But then to most people boardgames themselves are pretty far up that dang pyramid.

If 3500 boardgames are released each year, nobody is buying them all.

Of course, when a best loved game gets blinged up, its a lot harder to resist. “If you truly loved me you would upgrade meeee!” screams Castles of Burgundy from my shelf. “But if I TRULY loved you, surely I’d love you the way you ARE?” I reply.

Well loved.

Lived in.

People often refer to blinged up versions as heirloom versions – versions that could, hypothetically, be passed down through generations as yet unborn, sharing the love of Catan or Burgundy down through the ages. And yet the bling age is a relatively new thing. Who knows how it pans out. How many years before an even more blinged up version is released, now featuring blinged up expansions?

Catan gets a Seafarers/Knights blinged up expansion later in the year.

But blinged up versions also remind us that we are poor. Poorer than we should be. When I started in the games industry my contemporaries were folks like Christian Petersen. Turns out savvy games publishing was a much better bet for millionaire status than games retail.

It was UK Games Expo last weekend, which meant I ran another Game Table Gauntlet. I don’t consider myself rich enough to afford a dedicated game table, after an incident at Essen when I realised the price of the game table I was looking at was in fact only the 10% deposit.

People do own tables the price of cars. Go back a few years and that table is more expensive than my first house.

I like the fact that our hobby is comparatively cheap. D&D in particular can be literally decades of entertainment for the cost of one players handbook. It’s an interesting question: what IS value?

What is worth?

Value is in the eye of the consumer just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A lot of the time I’m arguing that my store and my staff add value and justify a higher sticker price than a store where maybe they care less or stock less but certainly charge less.

And that’s kind of my issue.

Blinged up games is a bad look in a cost of living crisis. You end up having conversations with people about how they have just spent a thousand pounds on a Kickstarter while they are arguing about buying a game at a quid over MSRP. Nobody is prepared to see value in paying staff more, say.

Blinged up goods have to be expensive. Caviar tastes like the worlds worst sherbet. I’d rather have a cream soda than a glass of champagne. We consume the things people tell us have value conspicuously because that’s how we know they have value.

Because other people can’t consume them. That’s the point of luxury.

To complain about the price is missing the point. Castles of Burgundy and Tsuro were, for many years, stupidly cheap. Almost deliberately, insultingly so. You could buy them both for less than £20 each while the vast majority of games cost more.

For an industry this is not a kindness.

People would compare newly released games against castles of Burgundy and use its price as an argument why games were over priced. “Why can’t this or that game be £20 if the excellent castles of Burgundy is” followed closely by “you are ripping me off!”

Well, sadly no.

Why wasn’t Catan the cost of Castles of Burgundy? How is it now £50? How is Blingundy now hundreds? Castles was half the price it should have been and now it is ten times the price it was. Whichever way you sliced it, it was still a great game. Whether you own the blinged version or not, or play it eating caviar and quaffing champagne or while sharing a bag of chips its still a great game.

Because that’s the value of games, ultimately.

It’s the playing of them.

I play D&D with miniatures. I like that tactility of miniatures in a 3d space. I own Dwarven Forge and Warlock Tiles. Will Blingundy give a more pleasurable tactile game experience? Will it be more visually attractive? Will I enjoy playing it ever so slightly more?

I think we all know the answer is probably yes.

Is that ‘more’ quantifiable into value?

If its a hot day and you are sat in a car without air con, you suddenly see the value in having it. Bum cold? Seat warmers. You can live your life without them. They don’t add to the experience of going from point A to point B, except when they do.

At the end of the day the ultimate way of blinging your gaming experience is having cool friends to play with. Because however much money you spent or however much money you saved, having friends who put up with your bullshit and share a bag of chips with you is worth more than anything.

And you can’t put a price on that.

There are plenty of games that are safe harbours. Plenty of workmanlike companies that punt out success after moderate success. There will always be a market for Games Workshop. There will always be a market for Pokemon. There will always be families dreaming of playing a boardgame together.

People don’t suddenly drop thousands of pounds on a brand new miniatures game or a cardgame during a monetary crisis. People need to know that their investment is going to deliver a return.

Expect a Pokemon crash.

Here’s what has happened during the last few years. People raced to a nostalgia brand. People invested heavily in it. If they could only hang onto that bedroom full of Celebrations for two decades they’d all be millionaires. Anyone can be a trader in sealed product. Anyone can get a trade account. It’s a nice extra earner if you are on furlough or laid off during a pandemic. This time in 2040 Logan Paul III will give us enough money that we can go live on Ganymede.

This is a lie.

Collectibles are a pyramid scheme. You need more people coming in at the bottom to support a high end at the top. But what we got were kids who were kids twenty five years ago racing to a nostalgia brand. I love that they still love Snorlax. But they also love food. And the carboot sales of the early 2000’s were full of their Fossil collections.

Cardgames survived Rolling Thunder, the D20 collapse, the dot com bubble, the credit crunch and the pandemic. They survived not because of what they are intrinsically. They are pieces of coloured cardboard. Massively overpriced coloured cardboard. They are a game that people buy, a lifestyle they buy into, a friendship circle of people like them who like them – or at least tolerate each other. It’s not an investment in cardboard so much as it is an investment in people.

Yup. Events again.

If people aren’t playing then they aren’t buying. Buy a pack? Play some games? It’s a cheap form of entertainment. In a monetary crisis people need cash. Those big singles dealers came from somewhere – when folks are strapped for cash they have to unload their collections, and you may find you have enough cash reserves to buy.

Or not. Because in a monetary crisis when you run out of money you die. Nobody is saving you – they are too busy saving themselves.

Of course the other thing we will see is a race to even more crowdfunding – at the exact point in history that people will have less disposable income to invest. As the pandemic hit I was investing around £20K a year in Kickstarters. But you can only do that – on the possible pay off years down the line – if you have the money to invest long term. During the pandemic I needed that money for my core business.

Run out of money? I die.

Kickstarter is amazing in so many ways, but it is a risky investment. It may never deliver (though that is rare). It often delivers late. Recently my liability as backer is in freefall – there may be delays until after a retail launch, there may be extra shipping charges, there may be extra customs charges. Uncertainty is not my friend in a monetary crisis.

Even then, future Dave and Lizard brain Dave sometimes find themselves in simpatico. Lizard brain Dave backed Frosthaven and that looks like a sensible investment – albeit a pricey one.

Luxuries are luxuries even in a crisis. It’s a bigger ask and yes, you sell less. But there will be somebody who needs that product and wants it now. Who covets it.

Of course, that also means there is a possibility that somebody is going to steal it.

Four, a crisis of criminality. When people need money some of them turn to crime. There’s a moral philosophy question of when it is appropriate morally to steal. Most moral philosophers think it is OK to steal to feed a child, say – or to get a child medical care. But most shoplifters are not moral philosophers, and they aren’t selling that Brilliant Stars ETB at Macdonalds for some chicken nuggies.

The rise of Pokemon saw a rise in smash and grab theft, in shoplifting, in singles theft, in credit card fraud, in online fraud, in Amazon return fraud. In porch theft. There’s not enough police to deal with that, even if they knew how, which they don’t. It’s a sticking plaster for a gaping head wound.

This wasn’t crimes of poverty. These were crimes of criminality. Fraud is rife, and the companies that should be clamping down on it are aiding and abetting it.

This is only the start sadly.

When businesses move out, drugs and prostitution move in. There is a shadow economy that also likes to be close to where people live and work. This was the Northern Quarter when I moved into Manchester. Our shoplifters were snatch and grab addicts looking for a fix. Skeletally thin Prostitutes would wander in out of the cold, desperate for warmth.

Without urgent action from city mayors all over the world, this is the future for cities. We will all be Warriors era New York. And nobody is going to want to come out to play.

Cars broken into, Random street muggings. Kerb crawlers. Drug dealers hitting up your Yugioh kids. Your Yugioh kids hitting up drug dealers. Desperate times breed desperate people and Logan Paul has a Charizard worth a million dollars.

(This is not a good match).

Is criminality a thing you can mitigate against? Well, you should have CCTV and a secure building. You will probably need window shutters. Most modern units were built to stop ram raiding and most modern cars are almost impossible to steal. A shoplifter is – probably – going to check out your CCTV system first. A burglar is going to – probably – do a trial run of your doors and windows and next door vacant property. Most burglars aren’t spur of the moment guys. Drug addict snatch thieves are.

Don’t buy stolen goods. Obviously it’s hard to tell sometimes, but if you start buying stolen goods it’s impossible to stop. When my ex employer no longer bought in stolen goods, the shoplifters he had unknowingly cultivated as a clientele started targeting him in revenge.

The strongest defence against criminality is footfall. That light industrial unit miles from anywhere? Turns out it was cheap for a reason. In Central Manchester the police will come in minutes, because they understand the danger of public order and public perception of order being synonymous. They are not there to protect me, but to protect the city, the property, the money. All that requires the perception of safety. And so they protect me.

Criminality isn’t something you can ever stamp out. You can only move it to another part of town. The stronger your neighbour businesses are, the less likely it will be your part of town. I worry for the restaurants and cafes that surround me. Because times are tough for hospitality and only going to get tougher.   

Tougher for us too.

But we have things we can sell and experiences we can deliver above and beyond lunch service. Chances are we are about to see a recession, but we have traded through those before.

What we have not traded through before is a depression.

Or a world war.

Nobody alive knows what that is like. Well, nobody in the west.

During the last recession I survived because I traded on providing cheap entertainment experiences. Maximum happiness, minimum outlay. I understand why many of you are loathe to do that.

In a recession people move to safe havens. Investors buy gold or sad looking apes wearing yachting clothes. Crypto bros desperate for the world to burn so they can be rich.

Magic

GW

Low priced family boardgames

D&D

Yugioh

We know this because that’s where the money fled during the stock market crash of 1929. To the stock equivalents.

People still buy luxury. That luxury is a copy of Frosthaven.

I expect we will see a Kickstarter funding crisis. I expect that we will see more projects using the platform for completed products ready to go to reduce lead time.

We are already seeing people flipping Kickstarters as soon as they arrive in every group dedicated to boardgames. These groups should be serving as springboards for people excited to play, not offloading the crown jewels at cost. Like everything its a confidence issue at the end of the day.

People start questioning the very value proposition.

Many boardgames are overpriced. Not for what they deliver – in a way – but in comparison to other games that also deliver the same degree of entertainment. If you can play a game half a dozen times with four people? The difference becomes one is $40 and another is $100.

A recession is two quarters of negative economic growth. We are not seeing that at the moment because inflation is rampant and we are emerging from a pandemic where nothing was performing as expected. But all those bills are coming due now.

Choose your partners wisely.

Support those publishers who best support you, who produce the games that you can sell. Not ‘want to’ but can. I love you all and I want you all to prosper. But in order for me to continue to deliver that level of support I have to survive too.

If you have depth of stock that you have paid for? You can probably ride this out. If you didn’t pay down your loans when you had the chance, things are going to get pretty choppy pretty quickly. Those Pokebros can’t pay their bills with Charizard and neither can you.

Form strategic alliances with your fellow local businesses. Buy every meal you can afford at a local cafe or restaurant. These are your wingmen staving off urban decay. At least in a pinch you can all eat their overstocks.

The difference between a recession and a depression? It’s probably around 80% of us. So lets hope its the former.

In London in 1929 there were 268,000 Cinema seats. Of the big five motion picture companies, only MGM made a profit in the thirties. Cinema switched to lower budget b movies and kept prices low. Ticket prices dropped by a third. Staff were laid off.

The other crisis we face is a staffing crisis.

At the moment the brunt of the Great Resignation is being felt in hospitality. People don’t want to do hard work for low wages. But if restaurants are running on empty, there’s no money for wage increases. Delivery companies are fighting for drivers – another reason I predict the cost of shipping is set to rise.

In two weeks my staffing bill goes up fifteen thousand dollars a year. Minimum wage rises. National insurance rises. The cost of goods has risen. So far the expectation that prices will rise has not. Like many businesses I am playing chicken with the global economy.

You can’t afford to pay your staff enough to mitigate for all these other crises. The money in their pocket is depreciating faster than you can increase their pay. Support as many of them as you can the best you can. They are the only investment that won’t go down the Suwannee in a time of crisis. They are better value than a picture of a sad chimp smoking a hoagie.

As I walked through Guildford High Street I thought to myself, you know… game stores are in a pretty good position. We can pivot from events to stock and back to events again. We are a hobby that people enjoy, that spreads happiness and community. We are a panacea for loneliness, a little engine builder for dopamine, oxytocin and all those other lovely happiness hormones. We may even prosper, as impulse purchase and destination store browsing return from cyberspace.

But it’s not a given.

Cinema was the dominant art form of the nineteen thirties, but every economic analysis of Hollywood you read tells you how badly they were fucked. None of us can halve our prices and double our prizes.

A few years ago I visited Roanoake. I drove past row after row of derelict stripmalls and boarded up Wendy’s. The future isn’t hard to predict.

Because it’s already here

Somewhere.

I am your magic 8 ball.

Rocky times are ahead.   

One, a fuel crisis. During the pandemic many people got to work from home. And they liked having more money and more time. These people didn’t want to go back to commuting anyway, and now their fuel costs are doubling or tripling there is even more incentive other than every day being no pants Monday.

This affects us.

If you are a destination store that people are going to drive to, you are a bit screwed if they can’t afford to drive. Anything that adds cost on to their trip makes your already more expensive games even more expensive.

But there is a panacea for that, and you are not going to like it.

Because it is events.

Demos, learn to play events, painting sessions, Pokemon league, tournaments, some kind of food option in store or nearby. Bums on seats baby. The more people aren’t popping in for five minutes, the more the cost of getting to your store is spread over the time they actually spend in it.

This is anathema to many of you, particularly since we are still in a pandemic. I almost forgot that for a second. Turns out our best mitigating factor is our biggest risk factor.

I guess irony and tragedy are natural bedfellows.

Now, crises are by their very nature elastic. Remember two and a bit years ago when you were all ‘what does this COVID thing have to do with me?’ Well, fuel adds to the cost of every part of a products journey – from component to manufacture to shipping to distribution to you and to online orders, that cost is a cost and tripling it can only be absorbed short term. By everyone in the chain and compounded by everyone in the chain. Suddenly everyone wakes up to fuel poverty and it becomes a significant inflationary pressure.

The biggest pressure is on couriers.

Business was great during the pandemic for couriers. And I am pretty sure they all really liked that extra money. Like the global shipping cartel, turns out if everyone tripled their prices that’s just what it costs now.

Cheap shipping – free shipping in many cases from discounters – has been a thing now for a decade or more. The actual cost of shipping has been obfuscated. If the fuel crisis continues, that obviously can’t continue. Because those shippers have shareholders who also like money. 

(And it is global)

Two, a cost of living crisis. We are already seeing this. Fuel is a big factor in cost of living – many households in the UK were already having to find thousands of pounds more annually for gas and electric bills. One by one the decentralised companies who made their living selling somebody else’s cheap energy went bust, their contracts null and void. Somebody has to pay for the failures of an artificial free market economy.

Newsflash: it’s you. 

Food prices are next. Do you have any idea how much wheat Ukraine grows? Yeah, me neither until three weeks ago. Globally food prices are set to rise, some predict by as much as 50%. That’s a big ask for folks one stop away from the breadline. Its literally affecting the bread in that line. In the UK the Independent Food Aid Network identified that 2021 saw a 61% increase in the use of foodbanks. Governments everywhere – strapped for cash and brassic – are trying to wean people off the COVID support money by ripping away every safety net.

This bleeds.

What happens to the poorest sector of society happens to the next poorest. It’s like being on the deck of the Titanic when it is sinking. Oh, there went Bob, into the drink. Sucks to be Bob. But that just means I am next, right?

In a cost of living crisis, discretionary spending dries up, and it dries up fast. Yup, you lost Bob and his family and all the families like Bob. But if we cut back on Netflix we can cling on longer. Everybody up the deck sees Bob vanish below the water. It’s too late for him.

Eventually we are all bob bob bobbing in the Atlantic.

In business this is the ebbing tide effect. One big discounter went bust this week in the UK – we think, hard to say. They’ve done it before – possibly more than once – each time refloated with another voluntary liquidation, each time with more debt ditched and bridges burned. And a marginally different name. Like if I borrowed money off you and came back tomorrow wearing a false moustache and pretending to be my twin brother.

No… there was never a Fan Boy One or Two.

It’s already too late. The tide is already going out.

Still, even in the silt sea of Dark Sun, people will still need entertainment. And cheap entertainment. And that’s something we do, and we sell.

We were good at it once.

We have to lean into this. And that means leaning into products and brands and games in general that offer a decent value proposition. For an impulse purchase. 

The last recession the internet was not so prominently developed. On the one had, a fuel crisis means people are less likely to travel and more likely to buy online. But if that fuel crisis causes shipping costs to rise? The only people left will be Amazon. Because they are already diversifying into their own shipping.

You can see this as bad.

But most of the time Amazon isn’t cheaper than me. Because the folks selling on it have Amazon fees to pay and Paypal fees to pay and shipping to pay. And they like money too. It’s the clubhouse stores that I struggle with – even the multimillion pound turnover ones run by millionaires.

As we’ve talked about before, in a pinch hobbyists cut down rather than cut out. A snowboarder doesn’t have that luxury – they are either on the slopes or they are not. But a hobbyist doesn’t need to buy three games a month – a hobbyist average judging by the ‘look what just arrived’ posts on Facebook I see. It’s a brave hobbyist indeed who maintains that level of spending when their family can’t afford food.

Baskets remain unclicked.

We are all guilty of this – putting things in online baskets and getting to the checkout and thinking… do I really need another hundred pounds of terrain? I love making my characters in HeroForge and I really want to experiment with the prepainted plastic, just to see what it looks like but it was £70. Truth is, I don’t need to see how it looks like that badly.

In a stock crisis, your inability to ship a preordered Ark Nova is annoying. During a cost of living crisis its borderline criminal. Stores are taking money for goods and not delivering them. Some will be trading insolvently, with no intention of doing so. As it bites – and it will – store after store is beached on the rocks.

Consider Phlebas. Those were pearls that were his eyes.

The UK’s original deep discounter – Maelstrom Games – went bust spectacularly over a decade ago. You can use your turnover to borrow money when money is cheap. You can weaponise that against the little guys (like me). If you can’t guarantee stock but you owe money and you can’t complete orders? You don’t have the margin to trade out of your position. Sooner or later you will do a flit with that customer money, owing your suppliers hundreds of thousands of pounds too. Everyone is happy to run out the rope when money is cheap and living is easy.

Those days are gone.  

Three, a monetary crisis. When interest rates are low, the best thing to do is to invest. I can buy something, sell it for more and reinvest a thousand times before a pound I put in the bank is worth fifty pence more. And if I need money I can borrow it at historically impossibly low rates. I could buy houses, or cars, or more stock, or live like an influencer in Dubai. I could Katie Price that shit.

But I don’t.

Because sooner or later I need to pay that money back. And in order to do that I needed to generate profit on it.           

During a downturn risky investments are riskier. Luxuries are luxurier. There will still be plenty of people spaffing money up the wall, but for most of us it’s a time to retreat into safer harbours.

Deeper harbours.

By then everyone was rushing towards nostalgia brands. People laid off from their jobs were opening Pokemon stores in the bedrooms and garages. Distro loves new accounts, because a new account needs to totally outfit their store, rather than top it up. Suddenly Sports Direct are selling the Asmodee Top 40.

The money you lost during the pandemic needs to be made up somehow. That’s how big business sees it.

When commodities are scarce and shipping is expensive, prices rise. You can only soak a rise for so long. Then the rubber band snaps reality back into focus.

During the Credit Crunch of 2007 I was at GenCon. The pound was in freefall but I didn’t know it. I passed on completing a Reaper Minis order – something we were one of only two stockists in the UK for at the time – because the pound had dipped below $2. Lizard brain Dave doesn’t get out of bed for less than $2 a pound.

By the time I got back to Britain it was $1.70. Then $1.40. People talked about parity… All the MSRP’s for all my games was going to double. 

That Reaper order? Leisure Games had placed theirs. They had the full range at what was now my buy price. I couldn’t complete the order and hope I could sell it in time because my stock would be double what somebody else’s was in the market, and that’s a very bad look.

In a cost of living crisis.

The credit crunch also meant cheap credit was no longer available. There was no way of guaranteeing access to more money if you needed it. Surviving crises is always going to require cash reserves, but if you suddenly wake up and you are Zimbabwe – or Moscow right now – your money is rapidly evaporating like the morning dew.

Turns out both a cost of living crisis and a global pandemic could be partially mitigated by having stock, and lots of it. And cash reserves and lots of that too. These are mutually exclusive positions.

Having traded through 2007 here was what I learned.

One, people still want to treat themselves. A booster is for life, not just for the three minutes it takes to sip your latte.

Two, you will still sell high end games. Frosthaven at $250? It will sell.

Three, hobbyists are predisposed to continue to hobby… And ours is undeniably cheaper than snowboarding. Not gaming is like having a phantom limb, that will always itch and remind you of who you were.

(Sorry – I know that’s a bit ableist of me, but I can’t really think of another way of describing it. Compulsion makes it sound like it is too negative a thing, like a flaw that should be curable by therapy. I don’t think that hobbyists are in need of ‘fixing’ – that somehow we would be better, more acceptable people if we didn’t play D&D or whatever).

Four, …no matter what the cost. Yup, they will eat pot noodle for a month if it doesn’t mean missing out on playing that Magic prerelease. People cut down rather than cut out. They cut back rather than go cold turkey. They gravitate towards perceived value brands – either games that aren’t going away (Magic Commander, say) or where the barrier of repeat play is low (most boardgames and obviously D&D).

In store D&D saved my business in 2008.

But I promised you futurology, and this is just me raking over the coals of the recent and distant past. Let’s put another box of Fallen Empires on the fire, stoke up the flames and practice some pyromancy.  

All things are pointing to a cost of living crisis like we have never seen and none of us have lived through. Oil, petrol, heating, electricity, food – everything is likely to be in freefall. Or, the opposite I guess. When prices are rising rapidly, it means the value of money is falling rapidly. This means interests rates will rise. Money or access to money will not be cheap.

In all previous to 2007 global economic crises interest rates go through the roof, because hyper inflation is a way of rebalancing individual economies. But in 2007 it was artificially forced the other way. This papered over the cracks of capitalism and allowed lots of landlords to keep their property empires.

Boo hiss, amirite?

The pandemic has left brick and mortar business in a perilous state. I walked through Guildford High Street yesterday and half of the stores were empty. They ran out of cash or energy. The rest fell into two categories – high end designer stores with one or two attractive staff and no customers, and the ones desperately looking for staff. These were the big high street brands – Boots, WH Smiths, Marks & Spencers. Their stores look sad, because nobody felt the need to renovate or modernise for the last two years and now nobody has the money to renovate or modernise.

Its the Seventies all over again.

In an estate agent I noticed a flat cost £3250 per calendar month. Nobody can do that job in Boots and live in Guildford. Or anywhere else in the South East of England.

You can solve this easily right, by paying people more. Only… you can’t. Nobody is shopping with a store because they pay folks a living wage – not that we even know what that is in Guildford. Seems to me that a flat that costs £3250 PCM isn’t going to be miraculously affordable with an extra pound a week, just like skipping your turmeric latte isn’t going to let you buy a house.

My store is in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. When we opened eighteen years ago it was all drug addicts and prostitutes. Do you know how long it takes for urban decay to move in to a city centre where half the units are empty? A hell of a lot quicker than the eighteen years it took to regenerate the Northern Quarter into the beating artistic centre of the city. The graffiti – not the cool kind that tourists photograph – is already here. The most recent guy to deface my windows used an acid based paint to etch them permanently.

Times Square in the Seventies had been Times Square in the Forties and the Twenties.

Like NATO we all need strong neighbours.

A lot of businesses that are non-viable during a pandemic become non viable during a cost of living crisis. The fact that one has run into another? Well, it’s likely terminal for a huge swathe of businesses in leisure and hospitality. A rising tide raises all ships, but an ebbing tide starts beaching them.

And that tide goes out quick.

There is a threefold problem here. Staff, goods, and cash. You need the first two to generate the third and you need the third to pay for the first two.

Traditionally rents do not go down. Your landlord would prefer their unit to stay empty, because an empty unit with a high listed value is part of a portfolio that money can be borrowed against. If your landlord rents at half ‘market rate’, then they are effectively saying their property portfolio is worth half of what their lenders think it is. You can see how that can cause a panic if you were a lender. So they don’t. Rather some short term pain – your £50K a year is chicken feed compared with the fact that they borrowed against £500K on your building. My old landlord had a building nominally worth £7 million in which I was the only tenant paying £23K a year. If you can make the maths work on that I recommend a career as a landlord.

Already we see four simultaneous crises. How can we mitigate against each of them in turn.

Every retailer is a futurologist.

The future is coming whether you want it to or not – the big question is, can you surf it? Most of the time that is comparatively easy – we do preorders with distributors for the latest Magic set, or we back that Kickstarter, because future Dave is going to need that stock at future Fan Boy Three. Our preorders are a prognostication – a prediction of where our community will be, what people will want six months out or a year.

We are the prophets of profit.

Fortune telling isn’t magic. It is a science.

Every future is based on the building blocks of the past – it’s not like somebody has hit you with a stun gun and wiped your long term memory – you can look back at how many Pokemon you sold, how quickly you sold out, how much more do you need on top of your previous order and you’ll still be allocated down.

If you don’t embrace futurology you’ll be trapped in the present, a prisoner of the timestream. This is where you find most modern politicians – constantly reactive to the events happening around them, often in poorly thought out crowd pleasing ways. It’s easy to tell people what they want to hear – the fortune tellers of old were good at that.

That’s not futurology, sadly.

So what have we learned these past few years? What can we use to enrich ourselves? Can we ride the tsunami that is heading our way for fun and profit?

Can we at least survive it?

Futurology isn’t just about prediction. Futurologists are the norns, snipping away at the timeline, steering humanity to the best possible outcome. Knowing what that looks like will help you.

Most people assume that humans are, as a species, lazy venal and stupid. Few people Have lost money assuming this. Lots of people have lost money publicly saying it though. 99p is still a valid price point strategy, even though our rational brains are screaming at us that this is just a trick. Our lizard brain doesn’t care. It just wants that shiny penny. Lizard brain Dave will happily buy more stuff TO SAVE MONEY. Three for two? Five for six? Lizard brain Dave puts them all in his online basket and forgets about tax and shipping. Lizard brain Dave lives in a world of impulse and plenty.

Lazy.

Venal.

Stupid.

He basks on a rock, eats to excess, makes poor lifestyle choices. And most businesses are designed to capitalise on that.

It’s a poor strategy for a hobby business.

Almost twenty years ago I was instrumental in creating the earliest dedicated organised play stores in the UK. Other people had done OP before, but it was a table here, a table there. Or it was in a space with little retail attached. My theory was that if people played a game, and then they saw a copy of that game they would potentially buy it. Its why I dislike pure boardgame cafes as a model – oh no, you can’t BUY the game here – you do that online from a deep discounter. We just charged you $5 to play it.

To me there was a logical through channel – the more people played the more people would buy.

There are four pillars in the industry – miniatures, boardgames, roleplaying and cardgames. Each of these has need purchases and covet purchases. Dice, paints, players handbooks, sleeves – these are all needs. It turns out if you have evenets peoples spending on needs goes through the roof, because they are suddenly actively playing. But their covet actually decreases.

You see, as a hobbyist we want to demonstratably engage with our hobby. It’s how we know we are still alive, how we know we are still us. The price of admission to our hobby is the price we will pay, and by doing it we can call ourselves hobbyists.

Sorry. Gatekeeping is baked in to every hobby. You can’t be an angler without a rod. Without a rod you are just fish adjacent. But even though gatekeeping is baked in, you don’t have to pull on your waders and stand in the lake telling newcomers to fuck the hell off.

When I opened Fan Boy Three my covet spend went down. People who were passive hobbyists were now active hobbyists. Roleplayers who were actively roleplaying could spend £2 a week on table fees, rather than buying new books for new systems they would never play. That’s how it had been in my previous store. High covet spend.

Now, cardgamers? They spent big. Actually playing Magic every week meant they needed to buy boosters every week.

And they did.

In my previous job I’d never sold many booster boxes. I was shocked when my ex-boss bought in fifty displays of Pokemon, but suddenly I was buying that in for every cardgame – and more. This is the reason organised play stores gravitate towards cardgames. That table over there playing through Wild Beyond the Witchlight? They’ll have bought one $50 book in six months.

When things happen that cause spending habits to change – like a global pandemic – they affect retailers. And the better we can parse the events of history, the more prepared we will be. Future Dave loves it when I plan for the future, just as much as Lizard brain Dave loves it when I feed him cake and let him sleep.

During the pandemic four things happened.

One, people weren’t playing. So their need purchases dropped and their covet purchases rose.

Two, people weren’t commuting, so they had more disposable income and nothing to spend it on.

Three, people were anxious. At a low level of anxiety humans seek out comfort – comfort food, comfort reading and entertainment.

We call these things nostalgia brands.

It’s a human impulse to infantilise ourselves, to return ourselves to a state of non-responsibility. To a time when the thing that mattered most was whether we pulled a Charizard in a Pokemon pack or not. That our parents bought us. Nostalgia is always an attractive safe haven, tucked up in our duvet, safe in the knowledge that mummy and daddy will know what to do in the event of a crisis.

Infinitely better than actually being mummy and daddy and running around trying not to scream fuck at the top of our voices..

In retrospect it was a bad time to release a reimagining of Masters of the Universe. Wow, the online hate that got. It surprised even me. And I’m a fucking futurologist.

As a business what you needed in a pandemic – it turns out – was a robust website, a bottomless reserve of stock and a friend in the government who could bung you a PPE contract. Obviously there would be a shipping crisis. Obviously there would be a resource crisis.

My friend runs a restaurant/bar. You can’t simply turn off the taps. Beer goes off. You can’t simply turn on the taps. Beer has to be fermented. Stock bought in. All these crises compound each other.

During the pandemic you needed cash reserves. You had outgoings to pay, and potentially reduced means of paying them. In the UK most of the deep discounters made huge profits – only they were all continuing to sell at trade, so not really – while the rest of us existed on pity purchases. Most of my regular customers who used to buy in store decided that I wouldn’t really notice if they bought online. Only I am friends with them and they post all their purchases online on their Facebook feeds.

So yes, you needed mental health reserves too.

People handle trauma in different ways. My dad went into France on a glider on D-day. That scene in band of Brothers? Wrong army but sure, that was him. He always told me that people react differently under fire, that nothing can really train you for that moment or what you will do. Those that survived their first firefight? Some would believe in their own immortality and run to the sound of the guns while others cowered in a foxhole. Others turned off their emotion. PTSD affects everyone differently.

We have gone through a traumatic global event and it affects everyone differently. We all have PTSD now.

Oh look, another global traumatic event.

And another.

Having money doesn’t matter during a shipping crisis. Because if you can’t buy stock it’s worthless. No amount of money can get you a flight out of a warzone if there are no planes. If there is no paper or cardboard or wood you can’t manufacture games. The things we sell exist in a world of other things – they are right there, on the shelf, next to your product. No man is an island wrote John Donne, and no product is either.

If your game is twice the price of everyone else’s game, you won’t sell it. Unless you are Splotter. You can slice your margin, but you can’t slice my margin because I can always not stock you.      

During the shipping crisis people said ‘manufacture games in country’. Oh, yes, right. Why didn’t we think of that? Because wait – two decades of globalisation destroyed manufacturing industry anywhere but the cheapest places.

Turns out for Boohoo that included Leicester. But only if they ignored minimum wage and COVID restrictions.

Shocked, I tell you, like Captain Renault in Casablanca.

I have talked in the past about how my ordering at Fan Boy Three is biblical.

One.

Few.

Many.

In an ideal world every game is ‘forty’. There are a lot of forty in the bible because that was a really big number. It’s like ‘big number shorthand’ in the way that ‘biblical ordering’ is shorthand for ‘Dave orders by anticipating demand’.

Why is demand for some games higher than others? Can you quantify it? More importantly, can you predict it?

What is desire?

Today being Valentines Day it seems apropos to discus desire, even if it’s just in boardgame form.

Again I’ve talked in the past about how there are three essential tiers of customers: a casual hobby base who might want two or three boardgames a year, a hobbyist tier who might buy a boardgame a month and the cognoscenti who probably buy or back at least one boardgame a week.

One.

Few.

Many.

To the cogniscenti desire is intellectual. They know the artists, the designers, the publishers, they have contributed to the hotness – that’s what makes the hotness the hotness. Before the game is even on kickstarter they’ll know whether they want it or not.

(They want it).

Having an intellectual response to a thing is to have a covet reaction. The cognoscenti have to have it, because their whole identity is driven by being the person who has to have it.

Knowledge.

Physical product.

Experience.

We didn’t sell a single copy of MND Management for the first month. Not one. This is because the cognoscenti had it, but not enough of them had played it – which is a cognoscenti flaw. Like a flock of finches, relying on cognoscenti to drive desire based sales is tricky and almost impossible. Until there are enough of them in the sky you don’t see the pattern, because they are all flying in different directions.

A lot of influencers are cognoscenti too.

Having a game that you are excited about but get around to at some point isn’t ideal. But parsing which one you play when dozens are arriving each month is hard.

And so you wait.

MND Management doesn’t have an attractive box or a decent price point. It’s not a handselling game. The games we handsell are games we sell to people who don’t know what game they want, which is to say mostly the casual tier. The ideal game to handsell is reasonably priced, professional looking and quick to explain. You have a huge stack of them – many – so customers feel that buying a copy isn’t a leap of faith. They are taking your advice, and if we have a pile of forty of them it must be good, right? And to be honest, for a casual gamer pretty much everything they buy from me is likely to be a revelation.

Shopping brings its own desire. Purchasing brings a spike in dopamine, and the distance between the act of purchasing and the act of owning is something gamblers call ‘the drop’. The shorter the drop, the more addictive the spike. This is why slot machines work to fool your brain into playing them, why even that wasn’t fast enough for casinos and so we have instant video poker.

Drop drop drop drop drop drop drop drop love.

It’s the middle tier that is difficult to capture, both as a publisher and as a retailer. Hobbyists are like another great biblical reference – the disciple Thomas the doubter. If cognoscenti desire is of the head and casual desire is of the heart, then hobbyists require proof. Proof that this game is going to fill that void.

And this is where influencers come in.

You are an influencer in your store of course. Hobbyists bought stuff before Youtude, Instagram and Tiktok were a thing. They read magazines, watched reviews, weighed up decisions. If you don’t buy everything and you won’t buy nothing, choosing something is surprisingly hard work. Our Roman ancestors would have divined entrails, but here we are, joining Facebook groups and watching Shut Up and Sit Down.

The day after Wil Wheaton talked about a game during Tabletop Season One it sold out. Entirely. Globally.

Desire based demand is impossible to predict, because when those starlings flock you can’t believe there are so many starlings in the world.

Wingspan was one such game. Hence all the bird metaphors. Throw in some bees and I’m biblical again.

Print run after print run after print run – demand was bottomless. Even Bed Bath and Beyond got in on the act. When something is hot everyone wants it and nobody wants anything else.

Influencers don’t have to be a person. They can be a show.

Attendees at Essen drive the BGG hotlist, the BGG hotlist drives a proportion of sales – enough to make it a good arbiter of hot or not. This year there were three games everyone was talking about – Boonlake, Golem and Ark Nova. By the time two of those had hit stores, everyone was only talking about Ark Nova.

Golem doesn’t even appear to have entered distribution.

Ark Nova sold out. Is on rolling reprint like Wingspan and Terraforming Mars was.

Boonlake also exists.

You can’t sell many without desire. But you can’t sell any without stock. How many of the 3500 games released each year break through to evergreen? How many end up on my sale table, that each year seems bigger and lasts longer?

Is there a better way?

By Tabletop Season Three we were getting advance notification of the games in the series. Everyone knew the importance of the show and every game wanted to be on it. It should have run and run on primetime, but folks get greedy when they smell success. The temptation to bend that desire to your service is great.

Can I make somebody buy something they don’t want? Yes. Should I enrich myself at somebody else’s expense?

Should I in fact sell Metazoo?

The answer of course is a resounding no. St Valentine died for love, regardless of which version of his martyrdom you choose to believe.

Why didn’t MND Management zing? Because many of the people who had bought it loved it, but in a way that was clinical. Detached. Because it was too expensive, an odd box size that defied shelving and an odd cover design that defied impulse desire. It’s not a Hollywood rom com box – it’s a quirky arthouse cinema story box, dubbed into a language you don’t understand featuring characters you can’t relate to.

As an industry how can we identify and promote MND Management better? How can we springboard it into wider public consciousness?

The team behind it have – predictably – returned to Kickstarter.

A lot of people think Kickstarter is the answer to their prayers. If only more people knew about their KS campaign, they’d have more direct sales. That somehow direct sales are the only thing worth pitching at. But this ignores the desire of the now, the immediate, the impulse. It requires us to all be cognoscenti – to have a detached relationship with the objects of our desire. So this can never be a maximum strategy for market penetration let alone market domination. It’s a gated community we can’t break out of. A hobby that requires us to have disposable income to spend years in advance of gratification.

And put simply, this is not the way humans work for maximum happiness delivery. Desire by its nature is mercurial. It can’t fit into a two week preorder slot.

Look at the biggest selling games of all time. A thousand copies is great but it’s one twenty thousandth of the copies of Catan sold. Ten thousand copies – a hefty print ruin by anyone’s chalk – isn’t even a drop in the ocean of desire.

We need to be better at this.

And if we are the rewards are immense.

Not even the biggest games companies in the industry are pulling their weight here. In fact, nobody is pulling any weight at all. It’s like a scattershot of hopes and dreams spaffed off into the ether, in the hope that it works.

And for most games it doesn’t.

If you are a publisher or a distributor, head to your local store on a Saturday. See what people touch, what people pick up, where their gaze falls. Think of how people are going to find out about your game. Ask yourself why people are going to buy it.

Why they desire it.

Influencers, I want you to ask yourself a question. Is the game you are going to talk about available? Is it on the market? Is it sold out? Is the desire you are engendering going somewhere, like into a store and buying a copy of the game. Because honestly, that’s what everyone watching you review a game wants. What they desire the industry to be. Connected. Dots joined.

Desire fulfilled, satisfaction guaranteed. Or your money back.

One.

Few.

Many.

I want every game to be a many. I want the gap between desire and fulfilment to be seamless. I want publishers and distributors and retailers to prosper. I want to be able to handsell MND management like I handsell Wingspan, I want a giant stack of Ark Nova and you want that too.

St Valentine isn’t just the patron saint of lovers. He’s also the patron saint of greeting card companies. And if today isn’t about spreading happiness through selling desire I don’t know what is!

Oh, where to even begin?

These things happen because:

1) Hasbro don’t like to give full margin on products. Or any margin if they can help it.

We get reduced margin on Magic, on Monopoly, on pretty much everything except D&D – and well, they sell it to Amazon at a price so far below ours it is frequently cheaper to buy from Amazon than to restock from a distributor.

This obviously sucks.

But hey – the reason it sucks is because Hasbro has seen so many stores selling at 10, 20, 30% off. So obviously big mass publisher feels that big mass retailers can make money by selling a big mass of games at a slim margin. Because Hasbro.

2) Zavvi had exclusivity, so naturally they sold at a premium. But they were essentially fulfilling all of it and they have a larger operation than any one UK store.

Again, the myth that you can make up in volume what you lose on individual margin, so long as boxes come in and go out with minimal staff involvement.

3) In a race to get the good news out, Asmodee fucked up their pricing. I imagine that the extra £8 per copy is what Asmodee’s margin is.

That it was a simple copy paste error in a spreadsheet.

Now Asmodee would say, you don’t expect us to work for free do you? We have all the costs of getting the product to market, and we only made something like £9 million profit on the UK arm last year.

Games don’t grow on trees and neither does investment capital.

And they are right.

(See point 2 above: exclusivity)

As the Spice Girls sang, if you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends.

4) Concentrate – here comes the retail bit.

You see, everyone is racing to get the best deal out there to ‘steal’ the preorders. Like, there is going to be a lot of this coming in, but not enough – hopefully. Now, in a sensible world everyone sells the limited edition thing at MSRP.

But we don’t live in that world.

You see, the tank fills up from the bottom. And if you run a discount operation you need to buy and flip and buy and flip and buy and flip. It even has an industry term: pump and dump.

So yeah…See, shipping isn’t free. It has a cost. That’s what margin is for – paying the operating costs and the shipping costs and everything else. Go back twenty years and the top six game stores in the UK were very different. Until Maelstrom came along, game stores didn’t race to the bottom on price.

But after Maelstrom, everyone did. It was their sole USP.

Now, lets say you have a product like Dominion – the GW game, not the deckbuilder. You need to be the store that pumps and dumps your copies first – because you can’t afford stockholding. It’s all preorders, cheap as chips, get ’em out the door.

Oh dear.

Now, if you factored in a margin, you still have some margin. Just £8 less of one. That means with the margin shave – the haircut as we say – you are now only making 20%. Which kind of sucks if you are used to discounting 30%.

5) the consumer. When it was a Zavvi exclusive, you had no alternative but to pay the price. And hundreds of thousands of people did. Just that. Descent is £175. Heroquest will be nearly that once you’ve added in the bonus exclusive figure. GAME aren’t discounting it – remember how console games used to be part of a price war and now they are all the same price? Because publishers simply reduce the margin if they think folks are going to discount it to get one over on their competition.

Consumers don’t win long term.

In fact, they lose bigger. Because only the big operations survive – or the ones that flipped their Dominion’s first.

So yeah.

This is the reason i don’t take preorders. And yeah, all us FLGS stores do a tiny fraction of the business these big guys do. But I only need to sell one copy to their seven.

Now, you can blame any and every party in this chain. But its the culture of discounting, pumping and dumping that’s to blame.